Prashan Agarwal launches car portal 19miles; raises Rs 2.5 Cr

Prashan Agarwal, the former co-founder of online real estate services portal PropTiger, has launched a peer-to-peer transaction marketplace called 19miles, for buying and selling used cars, reports Vccircle. The startup also secured a Rs 2.5 crore funding from an unnamed angel investor.

19miles will use the funding to hire engineers in product and technology, as well as to expand to other cities. As of now, the platform is only available to users in Delhi. Users can browse cars for sale on the platform (as of now only 17 of them), based on make, price, kms used, year, owner, color, fuel and transmission. The company offers users a 7 day or 250 km money back return and a three month or 4000 km warranty on cars purchased on the platform.

19miles claims to certify cars with a 160 point certification from its experts, including ownership details, service records and the health of the car. Additionally, the company claims to take care of all the paperwork. For users looking to sell their cars on the platform, the company provides free inspection and photography and claims to guarantee the sale of select vehicles within 30 days from the date of inspection.

PropTiger exit: Earlier in May, Agarwal had quit PropTiger to pursue other entrepreneurial opportunities. At the time, the company made several other additions to its leadership team including that of former CEO of Karvy Private Wealth Sunil Mishra as the chief business officer, former Director of HR at UTi Worldwide Rohit Hasteer as the Chief Human Resources Office and former Head of Marketing at India Today group Neeraj Chaturvedi as the Chief Marketing Officer.

Competition:

– Earlier this week, Bangalore-based pre-owned car marketplace for buying and selling used cars GoZoomo (previously known as Zoomo) raised $5 million in funding from existing investor SAIF Partners. The company said it would use the funds for hiring.

– Car portal CarDekho raised an undisclosed amount of investment from HDFC Bank in May this year, a little over three months after raising Series B funding worth $50 million from Hillhouse Capital, Tybourne Capital, Sequoia and Ratan Tata. Previously, the company had also raised $15 million from Sequoia Capital for a reported 20% stake in 2013.

– In October 2014, CarTrade.com raised Rs 185 crore from Warburg Pincus, Tiger Global and Canaan Partners. It claims to currently offer more than 100,000 listings of used cars on its platform. It also has a used car pricing guide and and a certification program wherein the car’s present condition is jointly inspected by a CarTrade engineer & the selling dealer and a detailed report is included as part of the listing.

– Other players in this segment include Axel Springer’s CarWale, Times Internet’s ZigWheels and India.com’s Oncars.in. Warburg Pincus and Tiger Global backed classifieds site Quikr also competes with CarDekho as it features a used car listings section.